The Staples Model United Nations (UN) club will be attending the National High School Model United Nations (NHSMUN) Conference in New York on March 7-9. This conference provides a unique opportunity for high school students from around the world who are interested in a certain area of international affairs to come together and debate an assigned topic and develop realistic solutions for given issues.
“What I love about these conferences is the people you meet,” Jonah Bomback ’27 said. “I’ve met so many good friends from our last conference at Yale. It is a great opportunity to meet a ton of people from different places and work together to see what you can accomplish.”
At NHSMUN, students are broken up into pairs, each representing a specific issue from an assigned country’s perspective. This year, Staples students will be representing Portugal. For instance, Srish Popuri ’25 and his partner Jack Srihari ’25 are focusing on climate issues and balancing environmental protection with cultural celebration.
“People approach problems really differently,” Popuri said. “Considering it’s an international conference, people are coming from very different backgrounds and educational systems, so the way people think is pretty diverse.”
After many smaller discussions, each committee at NHSMUN collaborates to draft a resolution paper for their given topic, incorporating the perspectives of countries around the world.
“The resolution papers have such dense and varied ideas in them,” Graysen Peters ’26 said. “Our resolution papers are also submitted to the actual United Nations and looked at. In past years, ideas from kids have been used in UN discussions which is super cool.”
Last year was the first time Staples attended this conference, representing South Africa. As one of the only public schools in attendance, the club made a strong first impression. Four of the groups got awards, including past presidents Tucker Peters ’24 and Jameson Russell ’24 who won the highest award of Best Delegates for their committee. This year, Staples is hoping to do just as well, if not better.
“I’m nervous about the competition because there are a lot of experienced private school kids who have classes dedicated to Model UN,” Club President Jacob Calandro ’25 said. “The fact that we won awards last year is pretty insane, so hopefully we can do the same thing this year.”
Staples Model UN members have been working hard to prepare for the conference. Each partnership has written a 10 page position paper about their sub-topic. The paper will help each group be prepared to answer various questions on the spot, voicing the opinions of their country.
“The position paper is a great outline for how you are going to apply yourself in the conference,” Graysen Peters ’26 said. “We told people to really put their time and effort into it which we all did. I think that is going to be super helpful for us to be successful at NHSMUN.”
